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TThe traditional approach to compliance is full of inefficiencies like painstaking evidence collection, manual tool-by-tool access reviews, and similar tedious box-checking routines. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the average time spent on compliance tasks increased from 10 working weeks in 2023 to 11 in 2024.
Compliance automation gives much of that time back, letting teams focus on more impactful work. In this guide, we explain why automation is valuable and how to automate compliance processes in six actionable steps.
What is compliance automation?
Compliance automation is the use of software to reduce or eliminate manual work across the compliance lifecycle. These solutions monitor internal systems, processes, and controls to validate adherence to relevant regulations and standards, without requiring ongoing manual involvement.
The right automation platform reduces inefficiencies across several activities, such as:
- Documentation and evidence collection
- Risk assessment and scoring
- Compliance reporting
- Vendor due diligence
- Controls testing
- Non-compliance analysis at larger scales
Compliance automation is a core pillar of broader GRC automation strategies, enabling streamlined security management, IT compliance, and other aspects of a comprehensive GRC program.
The exact activities you’ll automate largely depend on your current workflows. For example, you might prioritize automated control monitoring and testing instead of performing point-in-time assessments, or focus on automating risk scoring to meet standards like ISO 27001 or NIST CSF.
Your automation potential also depends on your chosen platform. Compliance automation heavily relies on dedicated solutions, so you must select the one that aligns with your regulatory landscape, technology stack, and current workflows.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
How does compliance automation work?
Compliance automation utilizes robust integrations that connect your systems and other data sources to a centralized compliance hub. These integrations enable the use of trigger-based workflows to initiate specific actions and replace manual intervention.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), AI-based compliance automation is gaining traction as the next stage in process improvements. It provides advanced algorithms that go beyond predefined rules, which helps organizations stay on top of their compliance posture as it changes.
Compliance software doesn’t only automate individual point-in-time activities like evidence collection or control testing. A capable solution covers everything from streamlining risk assessment activities to continuous compliance automation through ongoing monitoring. As a result, it can free up considerable time and resources, so you can focus on high-value tasks.
Benefits of compliance automation
The advantages of compliance automation go far beyond increased efficiency. Other notable benefits include:
- Cost-effectiveness: By automating resource-heavy processes like control testing and data collection, your organization can reduce both time and audit-related expenses. It can also help you avoid the considerable financial repercussions of non-compliance with mandatory regulations.
- Continuous GRC alerting: Traditional compliance management leaves too much room for non-compliance to go undetected. An automated platform triggers alerts to notify you if compliance issues occur.
- Improved risk management: A capable compliance platform enables risk management optimizations and lets you augment your incident response system, ensuring more timely risk remediation.
- Efficient compliance audit management: Both external and internal compliance audits can be highly time-consuming and data-intensive. An automated solution makes it easier to schedule and run audits, as well as compile evidence with minimal legwork.
- Real-time visibility of data and compliance health: Compliance automation tools typically feature comprehensive yet digestible dashboards with a snapshot view of your compliance posture.
6 steps to effective compliance automation
There isn’t a standard set of automation guidelines, as you need to consider factors like your industry, available resources, and regulatory landscape.
That said, you can take the following general steps to ensure effective compliance automation:
- Review your current compliance program
- Plan process automation
- Choose and implement automation tools
- Maintain documentation
- Monitor results
- Respond to alerts and remediate issues
Read on to discover the key specifics of each step.
Step 1: Review your current compliance program
Start with a comprehensive audit of your existing compliance practices and identify what’s currently manual along with tasks that are best suited for automation.
This leaves you with an important question: What should you compare your processes against?
The answer lies in checking out the guidelines of specific standards or regulations you need to comply with. For example, if you need HIPAA compliance automation, your focal point should be personal health information (PHI) security and integrity as well as the scope of systems, people, and locations that are involved with it.
Whatever standard you’re automating for, start with a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement. This might include vague access control policies or inefficient reporting workflows that could benefit from automation.
Additionally, internal constraints such as budget, team bandwidth, and audit frequency should be considered to prioritize automation candidates.
{{cta_withimage25="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Step 2: Plan process automation
After reviewing your current compliance system, initiate the planning stage consisting of two steps:
- Defining compliance objectives
- Outlining the processes you’ll implement to achieve them
For the first step, clarify what you must achieve to ensure adherence to the relevant standards. You can use the applicable certification requirements to flesh out any concrete action items, measurable metrics, employee training requirements, etc.
The next step is to work backward from your objectives to identify roles and responsibilities and determine what needs to be done to fulfill them. For example, if your objective is to offer a centralized base for different stakeholders to update compliance evidence, you may need a compliance process automation solution with centralized evidence management capabilities for unified visibility.
“
One of the most challenging aspects is embedding compliance into day-to-day business and technical operations, rather than treating it as the responsibility of a single team. To overcome this, organizations should start by cultivating a culture where compliance is seen as a shared responsibility, including getting cross-functional stakeholder buy-in to integrate it into everyday workflows.”
To design automation processes better and establish overall accountability, create an automation checklist with questions like:
- Which processes offer the highest ROI from automation?
- What manual processes need to be reduced?
- Who should be the task owner(s) for overseeing risk and compliance automation functions?
Step 3: Choose and implement automation tools
Completing the above two steps should give you enough clarity on the compliance areas you need to automate. The next step is to match those areas with the corresponding compliance automation solution.
There are various platforms you can choose from—some only focus on a particular aspect of compliance (e.g., risk assessments or security compliance), while others are more comprehensive and allow you to streamline several compliance tasks in one go.
Your chosen solution will largely depend on your automation needs and budget. You can also consider the following factors when comparing different options:
- Ease of use: You may want to avoid hard-to-navigate solutions with complex configurations. Look for a platform with a user-friendly interface that makes employee onboarding and training easy.
- Data collection and analysis: Choose a compliance automation platform that reduces the need for screenshots, spreadsheets, and email chains during evidence collection. It should automatically pull relevant data from preset access points or provide streamlined mechanisms to do so.
- Robust integrations: To ensure productivity, your chosen automation tool must integrate seamlessly with your existing software.
When evaluating compliance automation solutions, it’s essential to make sure they include GRC workflow capabilities, multi-framework support, and robust integration capabilities. These features are crucial for ensuring you can cover compliance requirements across various frameworks and integrate your tools smoothly with other business systems. You should also explore continuous compliance tools with features that enable ongoing compliance management instead of only focusing on point-in-time assessments.
Step 4: Maintain documentation
As you focus on automating your compliance processes, it’s easy to overlook the importance of comprehensive documentation—a recipe for last-minute workflows during audits.
Each automated process should be tied to a control, policy, or requirement and documented in a manner that enables full traceability from the policy level down to execution and remediation. You should also clearly flag whether a task is automated, manual, or a hybrid and ensure workflows reflect appropriate levels of human oversight.
The good news is that most compliance platforms let you streamline documentation and create comprehensive reports without labor-intensive processes. Should you fall out of compliance, a clear documentation trail helps you analyze loopholes and take corrective action quickly.
Step 5: Monitor results
Once your automated system is up and running, you should track its effectiveness to see if it’s helping you achieve the internal compliance goals you set in Step 2. In other words, you need a solid compliance monitoring workflow paired with capable software.
As your internal operations, technologies, and the regulatory landscape evolve, your automation may require periodic revisions. That’s why it’s important to conduct regular audits to identify new areas for automation and remove redundant or ineffective functions.
As you perform audits from a self-regulatory standpoint, pay attention to the readiness of your compliance posture, including organizational controls and processes, technical configurations, and risk/vulnerability reports.
This task might be challenging without compliance reporting automation, so combining the right software with a clear reporting channel can ensure streamlined communication. Many compliance automation tools enable streamlined reporting, as well as continuous control monitoring that gives you a near real-time overview of your compliance status.
Step 6: Respond to alerts and remediate issues
Round up your compliance automation program by tailoring your alert configurations and defining how your internal teams should remediate the issues detected in real time.
When building your workflow for this step, it’s good to have a framework that distinguishes between manual and automated tasks. The idea is to ensure that your compliance team is aware of the extent of automation in place and can assign the remediation tasks to the relevant personnel.
Remember that the nature of remediation processes will depend on your specific regulatory landscape or industry.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
Automate your compliance program efficiently with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust and compliance management software that automates key governance, risk, and compliance workflows to streamline audit readiness and ongoing security tasks.
The platform offers built-in frameworks for over 20 commonly used standards and regulations (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, etc.) with automated evidence collection, configurable controls, and continuous monitoring.
With Vanta’s GRC product, you can streamline key areas of your compliance program, including:
- Auto-generating compliance documents
- Creating framework-specific policies faster with standard templates
- Getting notifications based on task ownership
- Using automated security questionnaires to perform due diligence on third parties
- Minimizing the chances of misused credentials with streamlined access reviews
- Conducting automated hourly tests and receiving helpful prompts to fix potential non-compliance
IDC’s report has revealed that organizations that employed Vanta for compliance automation experienced an average annual benefit of $535,000 and a three-year ROI of 526%.
You get a unified dashboard with real-time overviews of relevant data, which enables easy monitoring of all your compliance processes. We recommend leveraging Vanta AI to automate mundane work and extract desired information from extensive documents, such as vendor risk information.
Vanta integrates with over 375 solutions (task trackers, cloud providers, HRIS systems, etc.), allowing process automation across disparate systems.
Schedule a demo today to see how Vanta can help you eliminate outdated and inefficient compliance processes.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
Compliance
How to get started with compliance automation
Looking to upgrade to continuous, automated GRC and get visibility across your entire program?
TThe traditional approach to compliance is full of inefficiencies like painstaking evidence collection, manual tool-by-tool access reviews, and similar tedious box-checking routines. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the average time spent on compliance tasks increased from 10 working weeks in 2023 to 11 in 2024.
Compliance automation gives much of that time back, letting teams focus on more impactful work. In this guide, we explain why automation is valuable and how to automate compliance processes in six actionable steps.
What is compliance automation?
Compliance automation is the use of software to reduce or eliminate manual work across the compliance lifecycle. These solutions monitor internal systems, processes, and controls to validate adherence to relevant regulations and standards, without requiring ongoing manual involvement.
The right automation platform reduces inefficiencies across several activities, such as:
- Documentation and evidence collection
- Risk assessment and scoring
- Compliance reporting
- Vendor due diligence
- Controls testing
- Non-compliance analysis at larger scales
Compliance automation is a core pillar of broader GRC automation strategies, enabling streamlined security management, IT compliance, and other aspects of a comprehensive GRC program.
The exact activities you’ll automate largely depend on your current workflows. For example, you might prioritize automated control monitoring and testing instead of performing point-in-time assessments, or focus on automating risk scoring to meet standards like ISO 27001 or NIST CSF.
Your automation potential also depends on your chosen platform. Compliance automation heavily relies on dedicated solutions, so you must select the one that aligns with your regulatory landscape, technology stack, and current workflows.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
How does compliance automation work?
Compliance automation utilizes robust integrations that connect your systems and other data sources to a centralized compliance hub. These integrations enable the use of trigger-based workflows to initiate specific actions and replace manual intervention.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), AI-based compliance automation is gaining traction as the next stage in process improvements. It provides advanced algorithms that go beyond predefined rules, which helps organizations stay on top of their compliance posture as it changes.
Compliance software doesn’t only automate individual point-in-time activities like evidence collection or control testing. A capable solution covers everything from streamlining risk assessment activities to continuous compliance automation through ongoing monitoring. As a result, it can free up considerable time and resources, so you can focus on high-value tasks.
Benefits of compliance automation
The advantages of compliance automation go far beyond increased efficiency. Other notable benefits include:
- Cost-effectiveness: By automating resource-heavy processes like control testing and data collection, your organization can reduce both time and audit-related expenses. It can also help you avoid the considerable financial repercussions of non-compliance with mandatory regulations.
- Continuous GRC alerting: Traditional compliance management leaves too much room for non-compliance to go undetected. An automated platform triggers alerts to notify you if compliance issues occur.
- Improved risk management: A capable compliance platform enables risk management optimizations and lets you augment your incident response system, ensuring more timely risk remediation.
- Efficient compliance audit management: Both external and internal compliance audits can be highly time-consuming and data-intensive. An automated solution makes it easier to schedule and run audits, as well as compile evidence with minimal legwork.
- Real-time visibility of data and compliance health: Compliance automation tools typically feature comprehensive yet digestible dashboards with a snapshot view of your compliance posture.
6 steps to effective compliance automation
There isn’t a standard set of automation guidelines, as you need to consider factors like your industry, available resources, and regulatory landscape.
That said, you can take the following general steps to ensure effective compliance automation:
- Review your current compliance program
- Plan process automation
- Choose and implement automation tools
- Maintain documentation
- Monitor results
- Respond to alerts and remediate issues
Read on to discover the key specifics of each step.
Step 1: Review your current compliance program
Start with a comprehensive audit of your existing compliance practices and identify what’s currently manual along with tasks that are best suited for automation.
This leaves you with an important question: What should you compare your processes against?
The answer lies in checking out the guidelines of specific standards or regulations you need to comply with. For example, if you need HIPAA compliance automation, your focal point should be personal health information (PHI) security and integrity as well as the scope of systems, people, and locations that are involved with it.
Whatever standard you’re automating for, start with a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement. This might include vague access control policies or inefficient reporting workflows that could benefit from automation.
Additionally, internal constraints such as budget, team bandwidth, and audit frequency should be considered to prioritize automation candidates.
{{cta_withimage25="/cta-blocks"}} | How to choose the right continuous compliance solution
Step 2: Plan process automation
After reviewing your current compliance system, initiate the planning stage consisting of two steps:
- Defining compliance objectives
- Outlining the processes you’ll implement to achieve them
For the first step, clarify what you must achieve to ensure adherence to the relevant standards. You can use the applicable certification requirements to flesh out any concrete action items, measurable metrics, employee training requirements, etc.
The next step is to work backward from your objectives to identify roles and responsibilities and determine what needs to be done to fulfill them. For example, if your objective is to offer a centralized base for different stakeholders to update compliance evidence, you may need a compliance process automation solution with centralized evidence management capabilities for unified visibility.
“
One of the most challenging aspects is embedding compliance into day-to-day business and technical operations, rather than treating it as the responsibility of a single team. To overcome this, organizations should start by cultivating a culture where compliance is seen as a shared responsibility, including getting cross-functional stakeholder buy-in to integrate it into everyday workflows.”
To design automation processes better and establish overall accountability, create an automation checklist with questions like:
- Which processes offer the highest ROI from automation?
- What manual processes need to be reduced?
- Who should be the task owner(s) for overseeing risk and compliance automation functions?
Step 3: Choose and implement automation tools
Completing the above two steps should give you enough clarity on the compliance areas you need to automate. The next step is to match those areas with the corresponding compliance automation solution.
There are various platforms you can choose from—some only focus on a particular aspect of compliance (e.g., risk assessments or security compliance), while others are more comprehensive and allow you to streamline several compliance tasks in one go.
Your chosen solution will largely depend on your automation needs and budget. You can also consider the following factors when comparing different options:
- Ease of use: You may want to avoid hard-to-navigate solutions with complex configurations. Look for a platform with a user-friendly interface that makes employee onboarding and training easy.
- Data collection and analysis: Choose a compliance automation platform that reduces the need for screenshots, spreadsheets, and email chains during evidence collection. It should automatically pull relevant data from preset access points or provide streamlined mechanisms to do so.
- Robust integrations: To ensure productivity, your chosen automation tool must integrate seamlessly with your existing software.
When evaluating compliance automation solutions, it’s essential to make sure they include GRC workflow capabilities, multi-framework support, and robust integration capabilities. These features are crucial for ensuring you can cover compliance requirements across various frameworks and integrate your tools smoothly with other business systems. You should also explore continuous compliance tools with features that enable ongoing compliance management instead of only focusing on point-in-time assessments.
Step 4: Maintain documentation
As you focus on automating your compliance processes, it’s easy to overlook the importance of comprehensive documentation—a recipe for last-minute workflows during audits.
Each automated process should be tied to a control, policy, or requirement and documented in a manner that enables full traceability from the policy level down to execution and remediation. You should also clearly flag whether a task is automated, manual, or a hybrid and ensure workflows reflect appropriate levels of human oversight.
The good news is that most compliance platforms let you streamline documentation and create comprehensive reports without labor-intensive processes. Should you fall out of compliance, a clear documentation trail helps you analyze loopholes and take corrective action quickly.
Step 5: Monitor results
Once your automated system is up and running, you should track its effectiveness to see if it’s helping you achieve the internal compliance goals you set in Step 2. In other words, you need a solid compliance monitoring workflow paired with capable software.
As your internal operations, technologies, and the regulatory landscape evolve, your automation may require periodic revisions. That’s why it’s important to conduct regular audits to identify new areas for automation and remove redundant or ineffective functions.
As you perform audits from a self-regulatory standpoint, pay attention to the readiness of your compliance posture, including organizational controls and processes, technical configurations, and risk/vulnerability reports.
This task might be challenging without compliance reporting automation, so combining the right software with a clear reporting channel can ensure streamlined communication. Many compliance automation tools enable streamlined reporting, as well as continuous control monitoring that gives you a near real-time overview of your compliance status.
Step 6: Respond to alerts and remediate issues
Round up your compliance automation program by tailoring your alert configurations and defining how your internal teams should remediate the issues detected in real time.
When building your workflow for this step, it’s good to have a framework that distinguishes between manual and automated tasks. The idea is to ensure that your compliance team is aware of the extent of automation in place and can assign the remediation tasks to the relevant personnel.
Remember that the nature of remediation processes will depend on your specific regulatory landscape or industry.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
Automate your compliance program efficiently with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust and compliance management software that automates key governance, risk, and compliance workflows to streamline audit readiness and ongoing security tasks.
The platform offers built-in frameworks for over 20 commonly used standards and regulations (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, etc.) with automated evidence collection, configurable controls, and continuous monitoring.
With Vanta’s GRC product, you can streamline key areas of your compliance program, including:
- Auto-generating compliance documents
- Creating framework-specific policies faster with standard templates
- Getting notifications based on task ownership
- Using automated security questionnaires to perform due diligence on third parties
- Minimizing the chances of misused credentials with streamlined access reviews
- Conducting automated hourly tests and receiving helpful prompts to fix potential non-compliance
IDC’s report has revealed that organizations that employed Vanta for compliance automation experienced an average annual benefit of $535,000 and a three-year ROI of 526%.
You get a unified dashboard with real-time overviews of relevant data, which enables easy monitoring of all your compliance processes. We recommend leveraging Vanta AI to automate mundane work and extract desired information from extensive documents, such as vendor risk information.
Vanta integrates with over 375 solutions (task trackers, cloud providers, HRIS systems, etc.), allowing process automation across disparate systems.
Schedule a demo today to see how Vanta can help you eliminate outdated and inefficient compliance processes.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
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